Rage Of The Fallen (2011)

review 1: Another fine addition to the series. This is the 8th book in The Last Apprentice series and it was even more fantastic than the previous books.Tom has landed in Ireland with the Spook and Alice where they intend to bind the Fiend who is the devil.Delaney manages to put his characters in the worst possible situation, then fix them out, I love it.This book was a real page-turner and scary as hell.I love this book.review 2: This series is so much fun. It's fast reading. Delaney tells a great story. I love the characters. I'm usually not a fan of middle grade novels. I usually find them too juvenile at this point. Not so with this series, although I do have a few reservations, as expressed below.* In this installment, Tom, the Spook and Alice find themselves in Ir... moreeland since the county is in upheaval and it is too dangerous for them to stay. They meet with a new, terrifying thing of the dark…a Jibber…and Tom must fight off the Fiend and the Morrigan. And this time, he's on his own. So far, although I skipped books four through seven,** I haven't seen Tom on his own all that much, and I wondered how he would get out of the situation without the Spook coming along to save him. I won't say much more because I don't want to give it away, but I was happy to see that Delaney didn't resort to deux et machina tactics to save him. And now Tom is really becoming a stand-alone character. Don't get me wrong. I like the Spook. He's probably my favorite character in the stories. But I like to see a character have some struggles, and in this one, Tom had more than his fair share.Of course, as always, I loved Alice, and I was excited to see where this story took her. She's a much more complicated character than I had expected. Again, don't want to give too much away, but I am happy to see that she'll have her own strong character arc. I still recommend these to parents with boys, although, with some reservations. They are different, exciting and fun to read. *While I really enjoyed this, there was one scene where I wondered…"Hmmm. Would I want a little kid reading this?" Because it was flat out violently creepy. In fact, there were probably a few scenes that were like that to some varying degree. I don't remember feeling that way when I read the first three books. Yes these are about ghosts and ghouls, boggarts and boogie men, and even the devil himself, so of course you should expect some level of creepiness. But it was the level of violence that surprised me, since these are written for a middle grade level. I guess that is my warning to a parent with children who might be interested in this series. **I made a mistake…I read this out of order. I was at the library and really wanted to continue on with the series, but they didn't have books four through seven, so I just picked up book eight. With some series, it honestly doesn't matter if you read them in order or not, but with this series, it would have helped a lot. And although I understood what was going on, at least mostly, I also knew I had missed a huge part of the back story told in the previous four books, and of course, now I am kicking myself and wishing I had been more patient and waited to get to those books first. Alas…at least this has peaked my curiosity, and so I'm excited to go back and read the ones I missed. less